RFC Format Session

Tuesday, 22 July 2014

13:00-14:00

Ballroom C

Agenda

• Background• The RFC Format Design Team• Update on the drafts• Estimated timeline• HTML + CSS prototypes

Background

The format announcement in May 2013 indicated several things:

– the canonical format we are exploring for RFCs is XML

– four publication formats will be created from that XML: HTML, EPUB, text, and PDF

– non-ASCII characters would be allowed in a controlled fashion

http://www.rfc-editor.org/pipermail/rfc-interest/2013-May/005584.html

RFC Format Design Team

• An RFC format design team was put together during IETF 87 in Berlin to clear up the details implied by those statements

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rse/wiki/doku.php?id=design:design-team

Many thanks to Nevil Brownlee (ISE), Tony Hansen, Joe Hildebrand, Paul Hoffman, Ted Lemon, Julian

Reschke, Adam Roach, Alice Russo, Robert Sparks (Tools Team liaison), and Dave Thaler for their

participation

The I-Ds

• Reschke, J., "The 'XML2RFC' version 2 Vocabulary", Work in Progress, draft-reschke-xml2rfc-09, June 2014.

• Hoffman, P., "The 'XML2RFC' version 3 Vocabulary", Work in Progress, draft-hoffman-xml2rfc-09, July 2014.

• Hildebrand, J. and H. Flanagan, Ed., "HyperText Markup Language Request For Comments Format", Work in Progress, draft-hildebrand-html-rfc-03, June 2014.

• Brownlee, N., "SVG Drawings for RFCs: SVG 1.2 RFC", Work in Progress, draft-brownlee-svg-rfc-07, July 2014.

• Hansen, T., Masinter, L., and M. Hardy, "PDF for an RFC Series Output Document Format", Work in Progress, draft-hansen-rfc-use-of-pdf-00, June 2014.

• Flanagan, H., "Requirements for Plain Text RFCs", Work in Progress, draft-flanagan-plaintext-01, July 2014.

• Flanagan, H., "The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in RFCs", Work in Progress, draft-flanagan-nonascii-03, July 2014.

Timeline

• July 2014 – October 2014– Team to finish drafts to the point that coding

can start against the requirements• Drafts to remain as drafts pending discoveries

during the coding effort

– SoWs to be posted as a group for community comment

• October 2014 – December 2015– RFPs, programming, QA, draft updates, more

QA, tutorials and training, more QA, go-live

A Note on Publication Formats

• The HTML and PDF publication formats will not look like the plain text format

• The HTML and PDF as produced by the RFC Editor might look like each other

• Today’s topic focuses on what’s possible with CSS + HTML– These are only prototypes; the goal is look at

different possibilities in addition to the HTML versions available on tools.ietf.org, and decide what pieces from each work best for the IETF community

CSS

• See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rse/format/

Q&A

• When we run out of time, please take the discussion to the list:

rfc-interest@rfc-editor.org

<https://www.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-interest>